A survey was administered to 140 manufacturing firms selected from the Business
Review Weekly list of Australia’s largest companies. These firms were either ‘strategic
business units’ divisions of larger corporations. or companies in their own right.
The design of the survey was modelled on the manufacturing futures survey
developed by De Meyer et al. 1989. and Miller et al. 1992.. Pilot tests were
undertaken with groups of managers and management accountants to refine the
design and focus the content. Within the survey, respondents were asked to indicate
whether their businesses had adopted each management accounting practice and then
for those who had adopted the practice, to assess the benefits gained over the past 3
years. Respondents were also asked the degree of emphasis that their business would
give to each practice over the next 3 years. Demographic features of the business were
obtained, including the position of the respondent, organizational size and industry.
These are summarized in Table 1. A list of the 42 survey items and further details of
the survey method are in the Appendix.
Surveys were not pre-numbered to allow the anonymity of respondents to be
preserved. A reminder letter was posted 3 weeks after the initial mail-out. Two
months after posting the follow-up letters, preliminary results were sent to all people
who requested them. The two mailings resulted in 78 usable responses, or a response
rate of 56%.
To examine for non-response bias, the responses from the first 20% of returns and
those from the last 20% which would have included mainly respondents to the
second mailing. were compared, to test if responses differed between the two groups.
Levels of significance were determined for each item using t-tests. No differences
were identified, providing some support for the absence of a non-response bias.